As Nepal’s March 5 election date looms, voters face a haunting set of questions: will the same old parties take power? Who is the right candidate or party to vote for? Whose speeches are to be trusted? And who, if anyone, offers an alternative politics?
On the ground across the Himalayan nation, from its western-most to eastern-most ends, to social media feeds in the digital world, electoral candidates are staging their campaigns right, left and centre.
Many Nepalis are still traumatised by the memory of September 8, 2025, the day a peaceful protest against a social media ban ended in blood, when police gunfire met young demonstrators in front of the Parliament. By nightfall, the death toll stood at 19, with over 300 injured.
Social media feeds erupted with shock, fear and competing claims. One video clip that stood out showed a young woman on a motorbike rescuing an injured protester.
She was later identified as Kishori Karki, a law graduate in her 20s. In the chaos, she had borrowed a bike from a rider who was on the Pathao ride-hailing app to rush the wounded to safety.
Weeks later, Karki made the news again by registering a new political party for the March polls. She later joined Ujyalo Nepal, another newly formed party. Now she is contesting from her hometown, Okhaldhunga in Koshi Province, eastern Nepal.
Karki is acutely aware that viral fame on social media doesn’t always translate to the ballot box, especially in rural constituencies like Okhaldhunga.
“Trust is built on the ground,” Karki told Sapan News.
She said that she is personally engaging with farmers, elders and women with a focus on practical issues such as agriculture, tourism, health and education that affect everyday life. “I want to create opportunities so that young people aren’t forced to migrate abroad due to lack of options,” she said.
While 120 political parties initially signed up for the election, only about half of them followed through by fielding candidates. Out of the 3,484 total candidates running for 275 parliamentary seats, 2,297 are from 68 political parties, and 1,187 are independent candidates.
Among them, only 395 candidates are women (and one person from the “other” category) in the country with over 51% female population.
Prateek Pradhan, editor-in-chief of Baahrakhari, a Nepali-language news outlet, told Sapan News, “The Constitution of Nepal 2015 allows any number of political parties provided they can gather signatures of 500 voters and have their own party flag, statute and election symbol.”
He explained: “The country’s constitutional provision and social structure are the major reasons for the mushrooming of the political parties.”
The voter registrations have gone up by 915,119 compared to the last election in 2022. But despite the heavy influx of new voters, concerns are mounting that if new and rising parties do not work together, the old style of leadership will be back in control – even though it was widely criticised as arrogant, unresponsive and unaccountable.
Analysts have warned that so many new political parties running separately could end up canceling each other’s votes. This concern was echoed in December by former education minister Sumana Shrestha, previously a member of Rastriya Swatantra Party, the party founded by television journalist-turned-politician Rabi Lamichhane.
Speaking at the announcement of the formation of Ujyalo Nepal, she cautioned that fragmented competition could inadvertently strengthen established parties.
However, it should be noted that determining where the votes should concentrate and who truly offers a viable alternative remains a complex debate.
Politicians, who were silent, complicit, or even instigative during last September’s tragedy, are trying to rebrand themselves on social media to be palatable to “Gen Z” – Nepal’s youth who were instrumental in overthrowing the last government, leading to comparisons with Bangladesh’s “Monsoon Revolution: of 2024 and Sri Lanka’s Aragayala of 2022.
Even more striking is the shift in narrative where candidates who oversaw the grim turbulence of September are now styling themselves as “saviours” or “heroes”, promising to “avenge” the injustice. Some are dressing up in traditional clothes and putting on cultural accessories of regions whose realities they would look past, had it not been the election season.
Some are selling the “we are youth” and “we are new” cards as their primary qualifications.
In this landscape, Nepal stands at the crossroads, asking itself: What kind of leadership does it actually need, and is it possible to find it in the March election?
Activist Saroj Kumar Mahato, founder of Blood for Nepal, a volunteer-based organisation to improve access to safe blood nationwide, saw a different reality in his hometown in Dhanusha district, the southeastern part of Madhesh Province.
“I noticed that many people were still not interested or informed about the process,” Mahato told Sapan News. He has been helping citizens to correct errors in their documents and clear misconceptions about the proportional representation system through community interaction and the use of social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Mahato sees a digital divide between generations. While youth in his district are eager for new independent candidates, elderly voters remain sceptical.
“Many older voters still feel that old and new parties are similar because the same faces keep appearing,” Mahato told Sapan News.
Mahato also talked about the looming crisis in the electorate’s understanding of how their vote counts. “A major concern is that many voters don’t fully understand the proportional voting system,” he explained. “They think it is not important and that voting for any party is enough. This lack of awareness creates a significant challenge for the election system.”
In Nepal, the House of Representatives consists of 275 members elected through a mixed parallel electoral system, with 60% seats allocated through the first-past-the-post system and 40% through a proportional representation system.
While Mahato’s name had also circulated on social media as a potential candidate for Dhanusha-4, he remained focused on the bigger picture.
“Nepal needs change, which is challenging but not impossible,” he said. “If more youths participate, ask questions, and take responsibility, we can push our political system toward meaningful and long-lasting change.”
While social media fuels the Gen Z narrative to a certain extent, Pradhan highlights the fact that there is no single cohesive force of the youth. There is, rather, a variety of groups with different political philosophies and ideas.
“The mainstream media have portrayed the political power of the youths much more than they perceive,” Pradhan told Sapan News.
He argued that the media fraternity often competes to highlight new faces because “our society is consistently looking for a hero, a saviour, a benevolent dictator kind of a leader”.
By overvaluing youth and Gen Z leadership, the media may be creating a skewed perception of political preparedness, suggested Pradhan.
However, he thinks that there are some pro-democratic youth with the knowledge to “get to the helm of power” by adhering to democratic norms and constitutional terms.
Many who start political parties do so to massage their egos rather than to serve the people, he added, pointing out that Nepal is still largely a society “still gripped by feudalism” – everyone wants to “be a big leader with party members as subordinates”.
Pradhan also believes that this sprouting of parties dilutes Gen Z’s political bargaining power. “As the newer parties emerge, the big old parties from the last parliamentary elections tend to consolidate their power,” he said.
He said that new leadership may not have political culture or experience since “some have been catapulted to leadership” by the 30-hour movement of September 8-9, 2025, with a presumption of getting votes post-Gen Z movement.
Pradhan pointed out that while figures like youth leader Balen Shah and Rabi Lamichhane, president of Rastriya Swatantrata Party, have immense popularity, they often lack deep “political roots and constituency” and are “unwilling to work under any other leaders.”
After the Gen Z protest, Shah, a 35-year old rapper who became mayor of Kathmandu in 2022, joined Lamichhane’s Rastriya Swatantra Party. The party is fielding him as the prime ministerial candidate.
Rukshana Kapali, a 27-year old, central committee member of the newly registered Progressive Democratic Party, believes Gen Z has a unique intellectual edge. “Earlier, our elders voted for parties as though it was something inherited, often ignoring the agenda,” Kapali told Sapan News.
She urged her peers to use their digital literacy to look past the “hero” narrative. “We have the capability of dissecting statements and agendas,” Kapali said. “I urge first-time voters to separate an actual attempt to change from a populist agenda by assessing the concrete ideas and goals of a candidate.”
As the second candidate on her party’s proportional representation list, Kapali’s seat depends on the party crossing the 3% national threshold, a “proportional” path that treats the whole country as one constituency. For her, this system is one gateway for marginalised groups to enter policy-making.
“Social justice is usually sidelined as if it’s not an important issue,” she noted. “I saw the need to enter politics to ‘clean the space’ so that better policies can be brought and social justice can be institutionalised.”
In the parliament, Kapali plans to advocate for a Federal Language Act to make Nepal’s state mechanisms multilingual, connecting indigenous languages with innovation, technology and employment. She also aims to propose a separate constitutional article for sexual and gender minorities, seeing social justice as her entry point. Beyond the policy, Kapali is aware of the weight her candidacy carries.
She has co-founded Queer Youth Group, a pioneering institution that organises the Annual Pride Parade and provides legal aid to queer people, focusing on transgender individuals’ right to identity.
“In the history of Nepal, and even Southasia, not a single transgender person has reached an elected national level position,” she added.
For her, entering the “uncomfortable” space of politics is about more than just a seat: it is about claiming a right to exist in the halls of power.
Leaders such as Kapali, Karki, and Mahato represent a generation that is more vigilant than ever in holding power accountable and taking charge of the nation’s future.
Bidhi Adhikari is a social welfare activist and a business administration student in Kathmandu. Sapan News associate editor Pragyan Srivastava is a journalist from Lucknow and a recent Fulbright-Nehru Master’s scholar at Rutgers University.
This is a Sapan News syndicated feature.
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